Emmanuel Macron has fixed Friday, the conditions under which France would be ready to approve the opening of trade negotiations between the EU and the United States, among which the exclusion of agriculture or the presence of environmental guarantees. At the end of a european summit in Brussels, where the topic was over, Emmanuel Macron recalled that the previous negotiations with Washington with a view to agreement on a large scale, the very unpopular TTIP, for the time being suspended, should be definitively abandoned. “This mandate is outdated”, he insisted.
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The EU and the United States have been working for months to achieve a commercial agreement announced in late July by the us president, Donald Trump, and the head of the european Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, in particular by negotiating a small trade agreement limited to industrial goods. This announcement led to a truce in the tension between the two parties, at the time when Donald Trump threatened to tax heavily the european automotive industry.
Fears of Berlin, the brake of Paris
But the pressure is on rise since the american president has reiterated his threats in recent weeks. “If we don’t find an agreement (trade with the EU), we will impose tariffs” on cars, he had said at the end of February. Gold Berlin wants at any price to escape taxes on automobiles, a sector vital to its economy. But Paris slows down the opening of negotiations for fear of waking the opponents of free trade, in the midst of a crisis of the “yellow vests” and a few weeks before the european elections.
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“If we were to move forward (…) we could do that by having safeguards: the first in terms of the environment,” said Emmanuel Macron. “I’m not in favour of this that we have new trade agreements, in whatever form, with whoever it is if it is done with partners who do not have the same climatic requirements as us”, he continued, the United States has left the Paris Agreement on climate.
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“The second thing is, the reciprocity in terms of openness of public procurement”, he also pointed out. The european Commission wishes, in this connection, to revive one of his old proposals: an instrument designed to promote reciprocity on international public procurement, an area where the United States, like China, are very protectionist, unlike the EU.
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